ion. We maintain the Academy for the strict
business purpose of teaching young men how to train our army in
time of peace and to lead and direct it in time of action.

Our future officers enter West Point when they are two years younger
than is the average at Sandhurst; the course is four years compared
with two at Sandhurst. I should venture to say that West Point is the
harder grind; that the graduate of the Point has a more specifically
academic military training than the graduate of Sandhurst. This is not
saying that he may be any better in the performance of the simple
duties of a company officer. It is not a new criticism that we train
everybody at West Point to be a general, when many of the students
may never rise above the command of a battalion. However, it is a
significant fact that at the close of the Civil War every army
commander was a West Point man and so were most of the corps
commanders.

The doors are open in the British army for a man to rise from the
ranks; not as wide as in our army, but open. The Chief of Staff of the
British Expeditionary Force, Sir William Robertson, was in the ranks
for ten years. No man not a West Pointer had a position equivalent in
importance to his at the close of the Civil War. His rise would have
been possible in no other European army.

But West Point sets the stamp on the American army, and Sandhurst
and Woolwich, the engineering and artillery school, on the British
army. At the end of the four years at West Point the men who survive
the hard course may be tried by courtmartial not for conduct
unbecoming an officer, but an officer and a gentleman. They are
supposed, whatever their origin, to have absorbed certain qualities, if
they were not inborn, which are not easily described but which we all
recognize in any man. If they are absent it is not the fault of West
Point; and if a man cannot acquire them there, then nature never
meant them for him. From the time he entered the school the
government has paid his way; and he is cared for until he dies, if he
keeps step and avoids courtmartials.

His position in life is secure. His pay, counting everything, is better
than that of the average graduate of a university or a first-class
professional school who practises a profession. Yet only three boys, I
remember, wanted to go to West Point from our congressional district
in my youth. Nothing could better illustrate the fact that we are not a
military people. From West Po